Strengthen Your Team

Quality Assurance: A Key to the New Higher Management Level

Oct 04, 2010

Quality assurance is necessary to enable ourselves and employees to succeed. It may sound simple, but it’s not.

The last several issues of LearningEdge™ have discussed the need for management to go to a new higher level. We have built on Albert Einstein’s statement, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

For most farm and agribusinesses, quality assurance is a key to achieving this new higher level. Quality assurance, or QA, is a term common to business but not so common in agriculture. You may have heard of the Baldrige Award given to firms that have achieved superior quality. Quality assurance is key in the Baldrige competition.

Let’s begin with the recent highly publicized recalls of eggs produced on two Iowa farms. I have no inside information, but I am confident that those farms had processes in place to produce quality eggs. The problems were created when those processes were not followed every time. It was a quality assurance problem!

We address this topic with three questions:

1.What is quality assurance?

2.Why is quality assurance important?

3.What are some examples of quality assurance?

What is quality assurance?

Simply stated, quality assurance is assuring quality. In our personal and business lives, we all have excellent tasks, procedures and processes in place that are not executed correctly – as specified – every single time. Quality assurance is assuring that tasks, procedures and processes are executed exactly as designed every time.

Quality assurance sounds simple. Let me assure you, it is not. We go to educational meetings, read materials, talk to our colleagues, study our records, and build on our experiences in deciding what inputs to use and procedures to follow. In general, we make decisions to maximize or optimize productivity, efficiency and profitability. The resources available to us and these decisions establish an unknown but real maximum potential outcome. Any and every time these decisions are not implemented exactly as specified, performance will fall below that potential.

Let’s look at three examples:

1.Farm managers who raise crops spend endless hours selecting crop inputs and designing planting, pest management, nutrient management and harvesting systems. These inputs and systems determine the unknown but real crop yield and quality potential. We cannot control reductions due to unfavorable weather, but we can minimize reductions from this optimum output due to failure to exactly follow the input and planting/harvesting specifications. Eliminating these reductions requires quality assurance.

2.Given our knowledge/expertise/skills and what needs to be accomplished in our position, each of us begins each day with an unknown but real potential for what we can accomplish – our potential. Every time we lose time because we have not established proper priorities, or work on a task someone else should be doing, or keep working when a break would increase productivity, we fall further behind our potential for that day. Time management and other tools to reach our potential are quality assurance.

3.Probably the most common example of quality assurance on dairy farms is proper milking procedure. We can, for example, look at this specifically in terms of Somatic Cell Count (SCC). Great effort is taken to envelop a milking procedure. That procedure and the physical layout of the facility again determine that unknown but real potential -- in this case, the level of the SCC. Each time that procedure is not followed exactly, it reduces the likelihood of reaching that potential, resulting in an increase in the SCC. The milking procedure is a great example of quality assurance.

Why is quality assurance important?

Quality assurance is needed to enable success!It is not something that is only needed because people are stupid or unmotivated. It is needed to attain the excellence required to go to that new next level of management.

Let me share a personnel example of quality assurance. I am an avid fan of the University of Minnesota Women’s Hockey team. For the last several years, I have been responsible for receptions held after the games for members of the team’s fan club. I have had to plan these receptions three to four times a year.

Early on, I developed a checklist that I use for each reception. Did I develop the checklist because I don’t know what to do, am unmotivated, or stupid? No! I developed and use it for two reasons: 1) to ensure that I don’t forget one or two of the many details and 2) so I don’t have to waste time recalling everything and doubling back to do things I overlooked. The checklist is a quality-assurance tool to enable me to have everything ready for every reception -- to succeed!

This is the most important message of this article: Quality assurance is necessary to enable ourselves and employees to succeed.

What are some examples of quality assurance?

A key to reaching this new higher level of management is to expand our concept of developing tasks, procedures and processes. In addition to specifying the task, procedure or process, each time we need to also explicitly design a quality-assurance program to ensure the potential is reached.

In agriculture, we have too often referred to all quality assurance as developing SOPs (standard operating procedures). SOPs are needed for quality assurance in situations, like the milking procedure, where the sequence of tasks must be completed in a specific sequence. Where the sequence is not necessarily crucial, as in my reception checklist example, an SOP is not appropriate as it overly controls the person completing the process, likely reducing motivation.

Checklists and ToDo lists are two of the many additional tools for quality assurance. A checklist is best used for a list of tasks that must all be executed correctly to successfully complete an activity. The order is not critical to performance of the tasks or activity but each must be completed each time the activity is performed. A ToDo list is great for identifying tasks that need to be completed, such as in a day or as a repository for tasks to be completed when time is available.

We at LearningEdge have a wonderful inventory of ready-to-use quality-assurance tools. Please contact me for more information (rmilligan@trsmith.com; 6521 647-0495).